Center for Undergraduate Research in Mathematics

Undergrad Students working with Christopher Griffin

Elisabeth Paulson (through ARL): Elisabeth is working on the intersection of Bayesian Games and Evolutionary Game Theory with the goal of helping to explain how cooperation arises from interactions among species in a game theoretic context and, ultimately, to see if these models can be applied to behaviors in online social networks.

Brian Cai (Honors): Brian is working on the intersection of optimal control theory and evolutionary games. Several archetypal evolutionary games (e.g. Rock-Paper-Scissors) have a parameter that causes bifurcation. If we treat this parameter as a control variable, then we can explore a situation in which a population is driven to equilibria (or away from equilibria) in a minimal cost manner.

Emily Battaglia (Honors): Emily is working on an agent based model of income inequality in the economy in an attempt to mathematically model / validate a hypothesis set forth by former labor secretary Robert Reich: "Inequality is fundamentally detrimental to growth."

Steve Styer (through College of IST): Steve is working on the problem of understanding the spread of information within Twitter networks using a combination of statistics and mathematical modeling.